


Something That Lasts

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Backstory, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mostly Fluff, Pre-Rogue One, Self-Esteem Issues, baze probably falls on grey or demi in this, probably not canon compliant, slightly nsfw mostly if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 01:40:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10776780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: There are lights on the water, a soft, barely there glow that still manages to make it look like the heavens have been tossed out onto the pools tucked deep beneath the surface. The kyber caves are a strange place, heady and intoxicating, thick with Force sense that can be as cloying as walking through incense clouds in the temple on holy days, and always humming.2017 Spiritassassin weekPrompt 7: Celebrations





	Something That Lasts

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a hot mess (like Baze), but it's the end of the SpiritAssassin prompt week and I managed something for all of them so I win at least on that. The timeline on this, much like the narration, is very hand wavy so. Also this only barely fits into the prompt, but Baze just did not want on a celebration.

There are lights on the water, a soft, barely there glow that still manages to make it look like the heavens have been tossed out onto the pools tucked deep beneath the surface. The kyber caves are a strange place, heady and intoxicating, thick with Force sense that can be as cloying as walking through incense clouds in the temple on holy days, and always humming. The caves are never quiet because of the kyber there, the way it sings and sighs and murmurs, a constant susurration that has been known to drive some sentients mad because they cannot decipher what is being said and has resulted in many more accidentally drowning as people chase the words, the voices into the deep pools that linger inside the caves, water deathly cold and inky black and deeper than anyone knows, as deep as the mystery of the Force itself. Some of the initiates are intimidated by the caves and the kyber and the still waters that never seem to move even when someone dips fingers or toes in, the waters just seem to part, sliding around the object but not creating waves, not undulating. Baze has always found the caves to be beautiful. He has always enjoyed stealing down into their depths whenever he can to just sit and watch the lights on the water, the reflection of the constant glow that comes from both the kyber and the equally luminescent kyber worms that make their homes in the caves. Everything here is silent and still and slow. It helps him think. It helps him relax and find himself, sort through all the clamor of the day and locate his own heartbeat, settle his own breathing, drift among his thoughts and return. 

Chirrut chides him that he gives too much of himself away, stretches himself thin like a garment worn until it becomes soft to the touch but ready to rend apart at any moment. “Will you rend me then?” Baze had teased because worry on Chirrut was strange and he didn’t wish to see it, didn’t want himself to be the reason for the furrows on his brow. Be light, stay light, stay exactly as you are and do not let the chains of me wear you down. I can carry those myself. I can carry them always and yours as well if you let me. If you only let me. I’ll carry the chains, and you carry the lightness. 

__

“Why do you love him?” one of Baze’s friends had asked with a sniff as though they could find no reason it in, no sense at all, as though the very thought was foreign and strange and disdainful.

Baze had followed their gaze out to the courtyard where Chirrut was, twirling his staff in the air with one hand while performing various kicks and jumps all to the delight of a group of younger initiates who kept laughing and shouting out suggestions of what he should do next, and just felt like his heart had melted right out of his body, that joy was weeping from his pores the same way that a workout would call forth sweat. Chirrut laughing, dropping the staff to fall into a tumble and then springing up again, hopping from hand to hand while the group of children cheered and giggled and loved every single moment of it. “How can I not?” He answered. A question for a question.

It made his friend sigh in frustration and push away from the table. “That’s not an answer, Malbus. He’s a nuisance, he’s a menace, he’s a clown.” The meaning behind the accusations, which were all true but not the entire truth of the matter, never the entire truth of Chirrut, was plain, was obvious. You are so much more than him. He does not deserve you. He is a fool. He is not worthy. 

And Baze ever cognizant of meanings, always good at reading and understanding words even if he couldn’t always make them work for him, looked up at his friend with stormy eyes and a hard mouth, with set shoulders, became a stone in front of their eyes instead of his normal soft heart and said, “No one can judge the worth of another. You should remember that. All is as the Force wills it, yes?”

“And the Force willed you to love Imwe?” Their tone was suddenly bitter, harsh and wounded at the reprimand even if it was small, even when they had deserved something much more strident, though Baze, as always, had held back in an attempt not to hurt their feelings.“I think you can’t answer me because you don’t know. You don’t know, and you don’t want to say it because then you’ll be forced to admit that it’s just lust over his stupidly perfect body and that dumb toothy smile and then it won’t have been the Force at all. It will just have been your prick. Which is making a terrible decision. He will hold you back. He will stop you from being what you could.” Then they had whirled on their heel and stomped away, robes swishing violently against the ground with the quickness of their stride.

He watched the robes for a moment before pitching his voice up, almost to a shout, to say, “Or he will make me better than I ever could have been on my own.” 

There was the smallest jerk in the set of his friend’s shoulders as though they were considering coming back to continue the argument, but then they must have thought better of it and hurried away. It was the last day they were friends. Not through any choice of Baze’s but because his friend avoided eye contact, walked off when he tried to speak, avoided him so entirely that it seemed like they had simply left the temple. It should have hurt more than it did, but while he could forgive the things that they had said about Chirrut, he couldn’t forget them. Those words would have always cast a pall over their interactions, they would have risen from the depths of his mind any time they spoke, coloring everything they said, making him doubt them. A failure of his own character to be sure, but still a truth that he could not get away from. 

“Jealous,” Chirrut had said when Baze told him about the interaction a week after it occurred. It had taken him that long to wear Baze down, to convince him to talk about it instead of holding it inside the way he held everything too close to his heart, too deep inside his mind, cupped in his great hands, leaching into his skin until it was indiscernible from the cells of his own body. Chirrut, sitting behind him, kneading great knots out of his shoulders and neck and back because Baze had made a fortress of his body and then filled it with everything in the whole universe. 

(“The Force did not make you strong for this,” Chirrut said the first time he did it, his hands smoothing down the length of Baze’s back, gentle, soft, getting a feel for where things were hidden, which old pain to start with and how all of them were intrinsically linked, the path his caresses would need to follow. “The Force did not make you for this,” he had said, and Baze had heard the clot of his voice, the wetness, as though there were tears there but had not turned to face him because he knew that Chirrut disliked being seen when he was vulnerable, preferred to be given a moment or ten.

“What did it make me for?” Baze asked in the feeblest attempt to change the topic of a conversation ever uttered, but he couldn’t help it because he wanted to know what Chirrut thought. The Force was. So much. So great and so everywhere and so big that he didn’t think it would have the time to put any particular effort into what he was, who he was since he was just one person in a sea of all the living things across the universe. One person. Surely not grand enough to be seen at all. But the idea of knowing what Chirrut thought the Force had made him for was intoxicating. 

Chirrut pressed a kiss to the nape of his neck, right below his hairline, that made him shudder. “To carry love.” One of his hands reached around Baze to settle over his heart. “Stop clasping your hands around everything that comes within your reach, fool.” Said in the way that they said fool to each other as though it were a different word altogether or fifteen different words, all the words one could find to express what they meant to each other. But Baze didn’t think there were enough words to actually do that. Not in the whole universe. “Just because you can carry them doesn’t mean that you should. It’s no good for you at all.”

Despite his madcap antics, despite his daredevil leaping, despite his falling asleep in lectures and disappearing during training, despite the fact that he would sometimes laugh in the middle of meditation sessions convincing everyone that he was not serious at all, Chirrut was the sensible one of them. Chirrut was logical and calm and settled once all the layers of frivolity were peeled back. It was the outermost layer, the one that most people didn’t bother to look past, the one that Chirrut didn’t really want them to. “Everyone underestimates the fool,” he’d said once when Baze asked him about it. “And I love when you laugh. When you smile. I like to make everyone happy, but you most of all because you seem set on not seeing that life is actually very silly; you make it so much heavier than it has to be, fool, and I cannot figure out why.”

Baze settled his fingers over Chirrut’s hand, stroking the back of it, wanting to kiss it, wanting to kiss him, wanting to trace his tongue across the planes and the valleys and the forests of him, to discover every continent and ocean and mountain of his form, but stilling himself because there would be time for that. Now he settled himself into the touch of fingers against hand, hand against chest, lips against neck where Chirrut continued to press them when he was not talking. “Is it good for others though?” he asked.

He felt the sigh more than heard it, felt it in the exhalation of breath against the back of his neck, felt it in the way that Chirrut’s hand seemed to clench a little against his chest as though it wanted to fight him because of the words, reach into his skin until he could lift his heart out and teach it another way to be. “Maybe. Probably.” Said like wringing water from a stone.

“Then I can’t stop, Chir.” Said low, barely more than a whisper, practically a thought stretched between them, thin as the glass blown in the temple workshops. 

And Chirrut resting his head against Baze’s back, lacing his fingers into Baze’s over his chest. “I know.” The sadness in those words was almost enough to make Baze wish he was something, someone other than what he was, what he could never stop being. But then Chirrut kissed his back and gently recovered his hand to go back to working on the knots. “You continue to be foolish, and I’ll continue to lift it off of you when it becomes too much.”

“I love you.”

“Of course you do.” It almost seemed like there was something else there, behind the words, under the words, but Baze wasn’t sure what it was and didn’t ask for fear of knowing, for fear of breaking the lovely thing that they had, new and fragile and just starting, a thing to be tended even if they were both already so comfortable. Whatever it was, it never rose like a wall, never came between them. Had he asked, Chirrut would have said, slightly sad, mostly wistful, “You love everyone. You love everyone until it hurts you, and I can’t stop you. I wouldn’t ever stop you because it is you. It is just you. But I have to try and protect you from it if you won’t do it yourself.”)

Jealous. The word tickled, and it was strange because Baze didn’t understand what Chirrut meant by it, by the light, haphazard way it was said, almost thrown out like something he should have figured out a long time ago but also like it wasn’t important, was nothing at all. “Of me? Do you think they liked you?”

And Chirrut laughed. Pressed his forehead between Baze’s shoulders, hands stilling in their work, and laughed as though Baze had said the most humorous thing ever while he sat there confused, struck and unsure of what was happening. “No, my love,” Chirrut gasped out between giggles, voice muffled because he had yet to lift his head. “Jealous because they wanted you.”

Baze had never thought of anyone wanting him, had never noticed the lingering stares of any of the other initiates until Chirrut had pointed it out to him with a knowing smile, nodding his head at each in turn and tugging Baze’s head down by his ear so that he could then whisper into its offended shell all the things he thought the onlookers wanted to do to Baze--things that they had not even done yet, things that Baze wasn’t quite sure how to ask for or how to initiate, but Chirrut apparently was versed in, which was knowledge that made him achingly aware of every part of his own body, flushed and tingly and awake--who would just lower his eyes to the ground and try not to let his shock become evident on his face, though he could never hide it from Chirrut. Chirrut who would kiss him until he could no longer be scandalized by lips and tongue. Chirrut who would then start on to something else, piece by piece, until it was Baze who was the one backing him into walls, Baze the one tugging him closer with a hand in his robes, Baze the one setting hands on his thighs in the mess under tables. Baze had always been a quicker learner and desire was easy when it poured from Chirrut’s cupped hands into his mouth. 

“Oh,” he said, suddenly uncomfortable because he had not been shy about his relationship with Chirrut around his friend, had been unintentionally pouring salt into a wound that he did not realize was open, and it was a cruelty that could have been so easily avoided had he just opened his eyes. 

As though hearing his thoughts, as if he could feel them when they were skin to skin, Chirrut butted his head into his back as a reprimand. “Don’t, fool. It’s not your fault you didn’t see it. It’s not your fault they never made it known. Except to be ugly.” And then Chirrut had moved like lightning, faster than anyone ever, hard to contain--Baze had promised himself when all this started that he would never try, never keep Chirrut closer than he was allowed, never smother him, never be altogether too much, never be a weight, never be a burden--slipping into his lap, hands everywhere, lips everywhere, sighing into Baze’s neck and then they fell into each other with no time for anything else even well-meaning words of praise.

__

“You’re missing the festival,” Chirrut’s voice cuts through the stillness of the air with the same sound as his staff when he swings it, and Baze thinks that they are one and the same. Chirrut is a staff, lean and long and deceptively strong, able to stand up to repeated harsh blows, able to lift heavy things, quick and smooth and lithe and lovely. Baze is not quite sure what this makes him other than something else. 

__

They played a game once, spread out on their backs on the roof of one of the temple buildings, Chirrut’s heads on his chest while Baze ran his fingers over and over his short hair, liking the way it felt as much as the noises that Chirrut would make, the way that he would smile or twitch his hips sometimes, small true reactions that were endlessly more seductive than some of the over the top actions that he dreamed up. Baze was enjoying the contrast between the sun warmed stones on his back, the weight of Chirrut on his chest, and the beginnings of the cold evening wind that was blowing up off the sands. He was fine with the endless stretches of silence, with sinking into thought and sensation and peace. Chirrut was the one who tended to get restless with being still unless he was properly worn out, and, despite his pleas, Baze refused to give in to the idea of fooling around on the roof, thinking it too public, too scandalous even for his daredevil.

“What would you be if you could be anything other than yourself?” Chirrut asked, letting the strange question escape like a bird into the air above them.

“Better,” Baze had answered automatically, earning himself the thump of Chirrut’s head against his chest, forcing out his air for a moment.

Then Chirrut clicked his tongue. “No, not. I didn’t mean like that, fool. I meant what else would you be. I would want to be a bird. I would like to fly. Can you even imagine what flying would be like?”

Baze shifted, letting his hand still on Chirrut’s head as he considered the idea of flying. “Yes. I think it would make me very anxious.”

“So what would you be then? Some trusty, load bearing farm animal?” It could have been a slight had Chirrut not caught his hand, pulling it forward to press kisses against each knuckle before sucking lightly on his index finger.

Baze groaned because now Chirrut was not being fair at all. “A stone. A mountain. Something solid, something steady.” Chirrut sucked harder, and Baze’s voice wavered, he had to close his eyes to focus on what he was doing, what he was saying instead of the fact of what was happening. “Or a river. Something that lasts, Chir. I would be something that lasts.”

At first he thought that Chirrut had taken pity on him because he stopped sucking on his finger, but then Chirrut’s hands were on either side of his face and, when he opened his eyes, Chirrut was right there, hovering inches away from him, something dark and wet and dancing in his eyes. “Force, how old are you? How many times have you traveled? Why won’t you just rest?” And Baze didn’t know if he was talking to him or something larger than him, something within him, something buried so deep that only Chirrut could feel it, only Chirrut could see it in that way that Chirrut had of just knowing things. 

When he was together enough to say something, he managed to get out a strained, “Why don’t you make me?” even as his hands twisted into Chirrut’s robes, pulling him slowly forward until they were lip to lip, breath to breath.

“Oh, Baze Malbus, fool, I intend to.” And I get everything I want, went unsaid, swallowed up in the kiss, passed through the glass thin connection between them, soaked up into Baze’s bloodstream and carried through all of his cells, ingrained into the beating of his heart, filling up every sac in his lungs until it was the only thing he knew. Chirrut would get everything he wanted. Baze could deny him nothing. Not even sex on the roof while the stars watched them and Chirrut’s cries of pleasure were stolen by the wind, funneled out into the desert to fill the valleys among the sands.

__

“Now you’re missing it, too,” he states, eyes on Chirrut’s face, eyes on Chirrut’s lips and his eyes and the fine bone structure and just everything about him, all of it lovely. Baze is tucked between rocks, huddled into a familiar alcove of the kyber cave that allows him to see so much of it, lets him watch the field of stars above as well as below and all around. 

(“It’s like being dipped in stars,” he had whispered into Chirrut’s ear the first time he took him there, his lips so close that they brushed the other’s skin, and Chirrut had shuddered against him with every word, his hand in his own clenching, a silent plea to keep talking. “Everything is stars. Sometimes I think I could become a star if I lingered here long enough, if I prayed to the Force long enough, I could melt into the kyber, into the stone, into the water. I could become Jedha and the holy city and the Force.” And Chirrut had made a noise that Baze wasn’t quite sure how to interpret before pressing him further into the alcove, straddling his hips, kissing him with a desperation, a ferocity, a longing that Baze didn’t often feel from him. It was a feeling that sucked him under as quickly as one could drown in the pools of water that littered the cave floor. Everything, everything, everything.)

Chirrut is careful around the pools of water in a way that Baze has never seen him be careful about anything before, as though he is anxious about them, about the depth of them, the stillness. It is strange to see Chirrut cautious, especially around something that Baze is comfortable with, but Baze has been coming here for years, since he was very young, stealing down into the caves in the middle of the night when everyone else was sleeping, when he could not find any solace in the upper world at all, stealing into the stillness of the caves to stare up at the kyber and the kyber worms, creating his own constellations in them and the stories behind the figures, which would move and change because the worms moved, crawling always toward another kyber crystal, to feed off the minerals slowly, slowly eating them to nothing. Given enough time the worms could completely consume the crystal altogether, glowing with it, leaving streaks of it in their waste as they moved. 

When Chirrut clambers up into the alcove, Baze spreads his legs out so that Chirrut can settle between them, back against his chest, and Baze twines his arms about his waist and holds him close. “You smell like temple incense,” he whispers into Chirrut’s short hair. 

“You smell like worm shit.” 

Baze resists the temptation to bite his neck in retaliation mostly because he knows how much he would enjoy it so he just hums instead. Sometimes the best way to pay Chirrut back is to not react at all. “You could have stayed.”

Chirrut shrugs against him. “I could have, yes, but I wanted to spend the festival with you so here I am.” They grow quiet for a moment, and the only sound is the kyber as it sings and thrums, the living breathing heart of their moon. “Didn’t you want to stay and dance with me?” he asks when the silence has gone on longer than he is comfortable with. Baze wonders if Chirrut will ever become be able to bear the absence of noise, of constant motion and finds that it does not matter so much because on this man the trait is endearing, on this man it makes perfect sense. It is something he can gladly live with.

The question betrays something that Baze had not considered. “Did you want to show me off?”

“It is a lover’s festival.”

Baze has missed something. Chirrut’s voice is not harsh or cruel, but there is a strange flatness to it that gives away the fact that something is wrong. “Yes, but.” He strokes a hand across Chirrut’s neck, traces letters there, writes love over and over again because it seems like a good thing to do. He clears his throat and shifts slightly, unsure of what to do or how to proceed because sometimes Chirrut’s leaps of logic are beyond him. Baze moves differently, slowly, like water, like mountains, ever present, changing gradually and mostly unseen where Chirrut is wind and sand, things that people cannot keep up with because they are never the same. Chirrut is storms out in the middle of the desert and fire. “It is more a festival for those who married.”

And they are not.

“Are we not?” Chirrut asks, and Baze’s hand stills in its tracing as it feels like all the air has been pulled from his chest.

“I didn’t. I didn’t want to presume,” Baze stumbles through the words, and Chirrut clicks his tongue at this utterance as though he cannot believe he has to put up with this, though there is fondness in it as always. Five years of fondness, five years of this, and Baze would take so much more, so many more, all of them, but he cannot ask because it would be greedy.

The temple does not forbid marriage, but they also have no ceremony to mark it. People couple and uncouple all the time, as the Force wills it, as love wills it, and the idea of putting something permanent into place seems to be against the very ebb and flow of the energy that winds itself throughout the universe. So Baze has never dared breathe the word, never dared to even think it for fear of it lapping onto the shores of Chirrut’s consciousness and being rejected. In his heart, in his soul, there is only Chirrut, but he is steady, and Chirrut. Chirrut is more of the Force. And Baze would never dare to ask him to stop following it, to stop flowing with it. I will never hold you too close; I will never keep you, he thinks, and they may as well be marriage vows. He has said them over and over, so many times and in so many variations. He has made his promises and tries to keep them all.

Chirrut twists around then so that he can look at him, and Baze settles a hand on his cheek. “Aren’t you the one who wanted to be something that lasts? Why can’t that be us?” he asks, pulling that memory up, those words of the mountain, of the stream, and Baze doesn’t know why it makes his heart constrict tightly, flare brightly, inside his chest except that it means so much. It means so much. It means everything. 

“I brought the lantern, and the matches, and the incense. I was going to do it at the festival, but then you wandered off down here so I guess this will do. Even though no one will know but us. And the worms you love so much.” Chirrut is talking, rambling, nervous. Baze can see it on his face and hear it in the way his voice slides slightly, little trips up and down his register, the same way he does when Baze is tracing his fingers down, down his abdomen. 

“I don’t need anyone to know but us, Chir,” Baze says, leaning forward, one hand still on his cheek and the other in Chirrut’s robes, slipping into the fabric to touch his chest right over his heart, which is beating fast and hard. And he kisses him like he will never kiss anyone else, which is the point, which is the promise.

There under the ground, tucked into the core of their moon with stars above and stars below and the singing of the kyber and the pools of deep, deep water, there where everything about them is solid and steady, where there is no wind and no sand and just stillness and quiet, where there is everything that Baze is but kyber bright and kyber strong like Chirrut, they pledge themselves to each other, they light the lantern and let it drift out onto the pools until it slips beneath the surface to descend even further down into the heart of forever to stick and shine and linger, to become a thing that lasts.

**Author's Note:**

> Come [tumbl](http://sarkastically.tumblr.com/) with me.


End file.
